


Once Bitten

by WhyNotFly



Category: The Magnus Archives (Podcast)
Genre: Good Intentions, Post coffin daisy is so weak, Traumatic Stress, and soft with jon, but there's some dark history there, friends with knives, my first daisy pov!!, this is pretty experimentally written but hush I'm having fun
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-12-19
Updated: 2019-12-19
Packaged: 2021-02-26 02:54:38
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,312
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21856396
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/WhyNotFly/pseuds/WhyNotFly
Summary: Jon Sims has always been a jumpy kind of guy.  Nervous.  Twitchy.  Daisy used to think it meant he was guilty.  Turns out he was.  Just not of what she’d thought.Daisy learns how to peel an orange.
Relationships: Jonathan Sims & Alice "Daisy" Tonner
Comments: 42
Kudos: 733





	Once Bitten

Jon Sims has always been a jumpy kind of guy. Nervous. Twitchy. Daisy used to think it meant he was guilty. Turns out he was. Just not of what she’d thought.

Jon Sims is the kind of guy who has spent his whole life waiting to be convicted of a crime no one told him about. Good way to nurse a victim complex. Great way to hang yourself on someone else’s crucifix. Basira says he’ll light himself on fire someday, hoping to keep someone else warm. Basira doesn’t say whether or not she plans to put him out.

Jon Sims is the kind of guy who crawls into quicksand to pull out a stranger who doesn’t even like him. Basira says he’s got a death wish. Basira doesn’t say she’d let him carve the veins from his arms if Daisy needed a lifeline. Daisy thinks there’s only so many times he can place the gun to his head before there’s a bullet in the chamber. Daisy knows he can only donate so many ribs.

“I feel pathetic,” Daisy says, as her nails slip uselessly against the thick rind of the orange.

“Physical therapy is a journey, not a destination.” There is a sharp click of decisive movement as Jon sets his pen down on his desk. He leans over his desk towards where Daisy sits slumped on the chair across from him. After the coffin, she enjoys standing more than standing enjoys her.

“You can stuff it with the inspirational bullshit, I get enough of it from the doctors.”

“Figured you’d enjoy my soothing voice.” Jon scratches nervously at the side of his neck, scarred skin flaking under his nails. Nothing about him is particularly soothing, but anyone could get sentimental over the first face they ever see. Like a baby bird imprinting on its mother. There was never going to be anything ever again, and then there was Jon.

“I’m weaker than a piece of fruit.” Daisy screws up her eyebrows and frowns. She used to get angry, boiling rage that would pour and pool in the hollows of her wrists, but now its a tamed beast, a quiet, whispered thing, simmering behind the dirt beneath her fingernails. 

“But you’re stronger than a fear god.”

“You have a tendency to leave out pertinent details, Sims. Especially when you’re involved.”

Jon shrugs, his muscles bunching and pulling his shoulders up before gravity drops them down. Daisy watches hungrily, as if she could steal the memory of how to move from his skin. 

“I’m not the only one who got out of the Buried,” he says, as though he isn’t a living corpse missing a few jigsaw pieces.

“But you’re the only one who didn’t get stuck.” 

Jon wraps his hand nervously around his other arm and rubs it up and down, like he’s trying to make the blood flow. “Let me do that for you.”

“I don’t need your help peeling an orange,” Daisy snaps, and then she regrets snapping because loud noises make Jon’s throat bob, and watching Jon’s throat makes her feel like the animal she likes to pretend she isn’t. “Just let me do it, Sims.”

“Right, of course.” Jon folds like a card table, waving his hands in front of him to wipe away the imagined offense of showing just a tiny bit of backbone. “Take your time.”

Basira says Jon is dangerous. Basira says his intentions are candle flames next to the bonfire of his actions. Daisy thinks Jon is the kind of man who does the greatest good when there’s no one there to remind him he deserves to exist. Daisy thinks Jon may be the kindest person she knows. Daisy thinks Basira might be wrong.

Jon is fidgeting again. He picks his pen up and puts it back down and shuffles through a statement and toys with the keys of his laptop. There is a frantic energy trapped inside his skin and Daisy can taste it, like the quick-pace heartbeat of a rabbit. He is trapped in his own archive. A drawn bowstring, lacking a target. But with arrows enough to cut himself on.

“Could you even peel an orange? You’re pretty scrappy there yourself. And you don’t even have an excuse.” Daisy’s tone never manages to waver into humor, but clearly Jon has been spending too much time with her because he snorts in mock indignation.

“My excuse is being a little occupied with saving the world from eldritch monstrosities.”

“By heroically hiding in a basement.”

“I leave the basement.” Jon picks at the dead skin of his burnt hand. He is breathing faster, Daisy’s eyes flick to the slight rise of his shoulders. She cannot peel an orange, but she can track his elevated pulse like a trained dog.

Daisy reaches into her pocket and pulls out her pocket knife, flicking the blade open with a practiced twist of her wrist. She presses the edge into the orange carefully, slipping it beneath the skin and carving away the rind. It feels familiar, an old muscle that’s only comfortably sore.

Basira says she never believed in second chances. Basira doesn’t say she’s waiting to pour the blood they used to share from her hands into Daisy’s. Basira doesn’t say she’s itching to dig her nails into Daisy’s face and pull back the mask. Daisy isn’t sure which part of her is the mask.

“Jon?” Daisy looks up, the blood rushing loud and insistent in her ears. Jon is pale and shaking, pressed deep into his office chair. His eyes are black and wide and panicked and Daisy doesn’t need to be more than human to hear him hyperventilating. Daisy rocks forward in her chair, trying to move towards him, to check on him, but her body is treacherous and full of pitfalls. She is built on loose soil. 

Daisy sinks forward onto Jon’s desk and he lifts a hand to his throat and grips it tight enough to bruise. 

“What’s wrong?” Jon is still not answering. He is crumbling in front of her eyes like a sandcastle in the rain. 

“I’m not magic, Jon, you have to tell me what’s wrong.” Daisy struggles her way to standing, leaning her weight on Jon’s desk. The orange tumbles off her lap and lands on the ground with a soft thump. Her words are a lie. She is magic. She is all the wrong kinds of magic.

She reaches a hand out to help and Jon nearly falls over in his haste to get out of his chair and away from her. He presses himself back against the wall as if he could sink into it. As if he wanted to sink into it. Daisy looks at her outstretched hand and it is holding a knife, blade forward like an extension of her arm. She opens her hand and the knife hits the desk with a clatter.

Jon squeezes his eyes shut and lowers his hand and Daisy breathes in the long scar that cuts across his windpipe. 

Jon is trembling and Daisy tastes iron beneath her teeth and she knows how she could give her legs back the strength they once had. She knows she could be what she was before. It’s so much easier to let go of the ladder rung and fall backwards. Daisy cannot peel an orange. But she could kill Jonathan Sims.

Jon Sims is the kind of man who would let her. Jon Sims is the kind of man who would believe her if she told him it was right. Jon Sims is the kind of man who wants someone else to tell him what he deserves. Basira says that makes him weak. Basira doesn’t say that everyone is weak, deep down.

And then Jon says, “I’m sorry,” and Daisy is right. He is guilty. Just not of what she’d thought.

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks for reading!! I've had this idea for such a long time and then when I finally wrote it.....it came out entirely different from how it was in my head. But oh well I really dig it and it's fun to write something really poetic like this :)
> 
> Hope you all enjoyed! Comments bring me so much joy and you can also come yell at me on my tumblr @apatheticbutterflies I post writing and meta and am generally fun so feel free to drop into my messages. Lots of love <3

**Works inspired by this one:**

  * [Twice Shy](https://archiveofourown.org/works/27689789) by [WhyNotFly](https://archiveofourown.org/users/WhyNotFly/pseuds/WhyNotFly)




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